All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Lookup hostname for IP address

Quickly share code or text from vim to others.
Sprunge.us is a code/text sharing site like pastebin, but it is easy to post stuff from the command line. $ How it works: $ :w !command In vim, w writes the current tab to a file when a filename is given afterwards, but if !command is given, the output is piped to the stdin of command. $curl -F "sprunge=

Create a bunch of dummy text files
Avoiding a for loop brought this time down to less than 3 seconds on my old machine. And just to be clear, 33554432 = 8192 * 4086.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

top svn committers (without awk)
list top committers (and number of their commits) of svn repository. in this example it counts revisions of current directory.

Script Terminal Session
script -f /tmp/foo will place all output of the terminal, including carriage returns, to a file. This file can be tail dash-eff'ed by one or more other terminals to display the information of the main terminal. Good way to share one's screen on short notice. Note: This produces a very accurate output, but that includes depending on the size of your terminal to be the same. You can clear screens or even resize the terminal for others using this function; I use it in conjunction with the "mid" command in my list.

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

print all except first collumn

Sort IP addresses
Sort IP address by order


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: